Private jet from UAE to Turkey carrying 11 crashes in Iran

Eight female passengers on board were celebrating a hen party in Dubai

Turkish and Iranian officials said there were eight passengers and three crew aboard the plane which crashed in the south of Iran while flying from Sharjah to Istanbul.

By AFP

Mon 12 Mar 2018 07:15 AM

A private Turkish plane with 11 people on board, all women, crashed in Iran on Sunday while taking the daughter of a top businessman and her friends back home to Turkey from a celebration in the UAE.

Turkish and Iranian officials said there were eight passengers and three crew aboard the plane which crashed in the south of Iran while flying from Sharjah to Istanbul.

Media reports in Turkey said the eight passengers were Mina Basaran, the daughter of a leading Turkish businessman, and her seven friends who had spent the past days in the UAE to celebrate her marriage.

The crew, including the two pilots, were also all female, the reports said.

The reports, carried by the Hurriyet daily and several Turkish TV channels, said the Bombardier Challenger 604 private plane belonged to the Basaran Holding company of Mina's father Huseyin.

The Istanbul-based Basaran is active in the energy, construction and tourism sectors. It also owns hotels.

Reports said that just a day before, the eight young women had posted a picture of themselves smiling and relaxing in Dubai on social media.

Mina Basaran had also posted a picture on social media of her boarding the same Bombardier plane before it left Istanbul for the UAE, the reports added.

She had become engaged in October and the UAE trip was a traditional "farewell" to her friends before marriage.

The 28-year-old had become a board member of her father's company already in 2013, Turkish reports said.

Iranian media said the plane went down in remote mountains in the snow-capped Zagros range during bad weather.

No maintenance applied for

The plane had left from the emirate of Sharjah and crashed near the city of Shahr-e Kord, about 400 kilometres (250 miles) south of Tehran, Iranian state television reported.

Sharjah Civil Aviation Department said in a statement that the plane "did not apply for maintenance procedures while on the ground at the airport."

The plane took off at 17:16 local time (13:16 GMT) and disappeared from the radar screen at 15:30 GMT, said the statement carried by the state WAM news agency.

It said the eight passengers on board were six Turks and two Spaniards. It did not give the nationality of the three crew members.

Reza Jafarzadeh, head of the Iran Civil Aviation Organisation, confirmed the plane had eight passengers and three crew members on board.

The cause of the crash was not immediately clear.

Hurriyet said the plane had two female pilots and a crew member, meaning all those on board are women.

One formerly flew Turkish army fighter jets as one of Turkey's first female pilots, it said. The other had worked in the past for flag carrier Turkish Airlines.

Tasnim news agency quoted an ICAO official as saying: "The plane is on fire. After the pilot asked to lower altitude, it disappeared from the radar."

Iranian media reported that rescuers had been dispatched by land to the crash site, which is located in a relatively isolated area of Helen's Mountain -- a protected area in the Zagros range.

Some reports said the plane went down during heavy rain.

The head of Iran's Red Crescent, Morteza Salimi, told state television that two helicopters would fly to the area on Monday morning "to search for the plane's debris and bodies" -- indicating there could be no survivors.

The Zagros range was the scene of another aviation tragedy in February, when an ATR-72 twin engine passenger plane of Iran's Aseman Airlines crashed there killing all 66 people on board.

The plane had disappeared from radar after taking off from Tehran on a domestic flight as a snowstorm battered the mountains.

Rescue teams had to battle bad weather for days before they were able to recover the black boxes of that aircraft and had to interrupt their operation several times because of bad weather.

They are still working on bringing the remains of those killed down the valley from the crash site which lies at a height of about 4,000 metres (13,000 feet)